h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Heya Peta,

This is a follow up from my message in the other thread. I wanted to know where you guys where with your idea of how collaboration with art works (and creative works in general) since my time in the Community Artist project I've done rather a lot of creative stuff as well as legal research.

What I'm thinking is that instead of the more restrictive ideas about content creation we have for media, we open the doors a tad. Don't get me wrong I don't advocate wikipedia style lack of accountability. But that we need rotten and baddly draw art as much as we need good works.

I've long been waiting for a website that focuses on the colaberation between artists, ideas, media creators and producers. There is so much more we can do together than we can do alone and yet most creative people have been trained to work alone it seems. We need to be using standard licenses for sharing and permitting people to use things for person use, remixing and creating new things. I'd suggest cc-by-sa-nc as it seems to have the right balance between the conflicting interests of the artists to keep control over their own work and the social aim of making sure everyone has the chance to play with all the content that's created.

The bad art noted above is required because like deviantArt, if you don't have bad art, how can you ever hope of growing your community enough to have it attract good artists or indeed make better artists of existing people? I think it's a mistake to restrict the public viewing of content to bad works, although peer reviewing is quite important, as much as editing and all the normal tools that normally apply to writing content. But we never restrict what someone can write uless it's offensive or breaks some of the other rules. I've never seen an entry removed because it was badly written.

Thoughts Peta?

Hi DoctorMO

To be honest it's not something I have a view on really - I'm not very involved in h2g2 nowadays - you might be better talking to the h2g2 Eds.

Some other BBC projects have run collaborative art projects at various stages, Dr Who were doing something with cartoons and user generated content earlier in the year in which people could reuse others content, but I'm not sure if it's still running.

There are quite a few creative projects listed here, but there may be others not listed on this page.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/create

Have a good Christmas..

Your not involved with the BBC but remain an Italic? how does that work then?

TO be honest I was after your thoughts, human to human; you've been in a position where your dealing with volunteer creative people and I am one of those people.

Although the BBC doesn't seem approachable to me; I'm a FOSS guy and the BBC is openly hostile to FOSS, so I don't have a great deal of confidence about having a useful conversation with anyone else.

Hi

No I said I'm not very involved with *h2g2* - I still work for the BBC and with online communities, but mainly on other projects.

I'm surprised to hear you say that the BBC is hostile to FOSS, we have loads of people working with us who are very definitely very pro open source - perhaps things are starting to change on that front?

I'll keep my eyes open and point you to anything that I see that might interest you - and I'll talk to a few of the guys, there may well be something around - perhaps on Backstage, I'll ask the experts.

It's a bit hectic here at the mo - preparing for Christmas always means I'm running round like crazy for the last week or so, and I'm away from the Mac over Christmas and New Year, but I'll try and come back in the New Year when I've got a bit more time.

Have a good one, see you in the New Year!

I hoped you had a good New Year

I think I understand the situation a little better now.

By hostile, it's not so much the IT guys or the little people, I know a few of the perl programmers who moved to the BBC after all. But the managers, BBC News seem to have an odd bias. hopefully it'll change and there will be people who understand that freedom has value, something which I think a lot of managers in a lot of industries don't understand.

When things get quiet let me know.

Hi DoctorMO

Ah yes, BBC News seem to come from another direction sometimes.

Have you seen BBC Backstage? I can't see any graphics projects in there at the moment, but you might be interested anyway...

http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/